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Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

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Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#211

Post by rozenmd »

blackrock wrote: post #73
stanislavb wrote: post #8

https://99remotejobs.com a job board focused on remote jobs. I have promoted it on both LiHunt (software dev audience) and SaaSHub; however that didn’t help. Not a single sale :) As a result, I’ve decided to make it FREE and open source the code. Hopefully in a few months.

What are you selling? Job posts? I hear monster charges something like $300 for a job post for 1 month. And $400 for 2 months. I would think at this rate, that there would be a lot of competition. Craigslist ran for years just on job posting fees in San Francisco alone.

Problem is having enough traffic to make the customer willing to pay $300.

For $300, monster probably gets you 100k+ pageviews a month. As a scrappy indiehack project, you're probably getting 1k at best.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#212

Post by viraj_shah »

ZguideZ wrote: post #144

In 2004 my brother and I developed a buttplug shaped like George W. Bush - we called it the Bushplug. Manufacturing was more expensive than we had expected but we sold about 100 of them - presumably as novelty gifts. Our price point was too high for a novelty gift and the nose was a little too pointy to be an enjoyable sex toy. We made our money back and had some fun with being featured on BoingBoing and Fleshbot. So…

This is hilarious. Thank you for the laughs.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#213

Post by newguy1234 »

I built an online course to help students self-study for AP exams. The idea was to build extremely high-quality courses for AP exams and then create amazing tools/assessments which would allow students to self-study for the exams. One of my signature tools was an adaptive assessment tool that would tell students when they're ready to take the exam. If the student wasn't ready then they would get a mixture of lectures, videos and small assessments to teach them the concepts needed to pass the exam.

I eventually closed the service down because the reality is the edtech market for these type of products is very small.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#214

Post by optymizer »

jlizzle30 wrote: post #146
CrackpotGonzo wrote: post #114

I built a really simple way to poll 50 random people in the US. It's called This or That and functionality is currently very simple. You submit a question along with two images via SMS and you get your answer back usually within the hour. I've had a few people use to test new logo ideas, to ask which of two TV shows to watch, or which outfit looks best. So far no one has paid for it, only a few hundred free users, bu…

Perhaps entrepreneurs wanting feedback on ideas could be good niche to start with?

If there's anything I learnt from discussing my ideas with family, friends and others, it's that finding the right people to bounce your ideas off of is crucial.

I think Will Wright (famous game designer) described this phenomenon well. To paraphrase, every time he would try to describe a new game to someone else, that person would create a game design in their head and play their game in their head, and then tell you what their thinking is. However, what you want, is someone to play _your design_ in their head. That's very hard to do without a prototype. For example, basically everyone told him that idea for The Sims is terrible. Only when they played his game did they see the light.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#215

Post by Ologn »

blackrock wrote: post #80
Ologn wrote: post #30

I began releasing my own Android apps in 2011, and the first several had little or no success. One piece of knowledge I learned from someone is that advertising paid decently for apps with moderate success. Knowing this steered me in a good direction. My first app with very small success handled Access databases locally on Android. As I had the first app which could do that, I released it in four days with very few f…

Is there really a large enough market that would want to fiddle with an Access db file on their Android phones?

What I learned is there was not. I got the idea for it one day and four days later I released the first version. One reason for doing it, despite an unknown but probably small market, was I could do it so quickly (I used an free open source Java library to handle the database). The success for that app was a very small one, it paid the $25 fee for me joining as a Google Play (then Android Market) programmer. The app which allowed people to read books was a larger market and was the real success.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#216

Post by mariushn »

dlkinney wrote: post #101
mariushn wrote: post #89

I built a hotel PMS system in 9 months without trying to sell it first to hoteliers (no industry experience, talked only to 1 hotel owner). Found out it's hard to sell it, even if almost/fully free. https://hoteliera.com/

Might want to retool it for self-storage businesses. There are a ton of independent self-storage locations (at least in the US) and they predominantly use hotelier software/SAAS. But what makes yours different is that it's modern and looks good. This is a HUGE plus for client-facing services, especially bill paying. Yes, they're cheapskates. And there's a ton of them, so initial sell is high touch. But there's been a…

Thank you, I'll look into it!

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#217

Post by CallMeMarc »

steviedotboston wrote: post #133

http://eruvstat.us - a website for Jewish communities to use to send notifications about the status of their eruv. I have a couple cities using it for free at the moment, but would like to get more signed up to at least break even on hosting costs. It's a pretty niche service, and so far it seems like there isn't much interest...

This reminds me of a video from "Half as interesting", is this also an eruv?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPYp3lOOOrg

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#218

Post by cutenewt »

CrackpotGonzo wrote: post #114

I built a really simple way to poll 50 random people in the US. It's called This or That and functionality is currently very simple. You submit a question along with two images via SMS and you get your answer back usually within the hour. I've had a few people use to test new logo ideas, to ask which of two TV shows to watch, or which outfit looks best. So far no one has paid for it, only a few hundred free users, bu…

Have you tried removing the free trial?

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#219

Post by joshcain »

rangelreale wrote: post #103

In 2006/2007 I built HTMLButcher, a C++ desktop application to slice PSD/image website designs made by designers to HTML. In these years sites where made with tables, so for slicing a design I had to cut the images and fit then into borderless HTML tables. I took 2 years to build it, and in this timeframe people started building sematic websites with CSS, and abandoning table-based designs. I managed to sell 100 copi…

I would have paid a lot of money for that back in the pre-CSS days, assuming it worked well. Was it purely image-based or could it recognize when an area could be rendered without using an image (like a single color zone/etc.)?

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#220

Post by lostmsu »

I made a tool called Diskache, which would combine an SSD with an HDD into a hybrid drive around 2015. You did not have to use the entire disk(s) for that. It worked on any two drives on Windows. But my marketing skills got me 0 customers beyond myself.

The target audience was supposed to be gamers (back then typical SSD was 150GB and GTA V was 55GB alone). I even got greenlit on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=61003...

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